Dreamcatcher

by Stephen King

“We’re starring in The War of the Worlds and you’re worried about high cholesterol?”

Our gray friends are telepaths, and they seem to spread that just as they spread the fungus.”

He liked watching people think, if they were any good at it, and now there was more: he was hearing Owen think, a faint sound like the ocean in a conch shell.

That lack of curiosity was somehow the worst.

And the last question, the most important question: Were the grayboys like us? Were they by any definition human? Was this murder, pure and simple?

“Pisces, this is your day of infamy. Stay in bed.”

No, they didn’t survive well here—not the grayboys, not the fungus they had brought with them.

One final coherent thought flared in his mind—You’re the cancer, Kurtz, you—and then died.

Because they were infectious, of course; whatever the grayboys said, they were infectious.

With the low men, according to his mother.

Suicide, Henry had discovered, had a voice. It wanted to explain itself. The problem was that it didn’t speak much English; mostly it lapsed into its own fractured pidgin.

It had been Jonesy’s body on the Arctic Cat, but the thing now inside his old friend was full of alien images and alien purpose.

Something had either crashed or exploded, and at least some of the nagging voices in his head had stopped.

He backed two or three paces away from the doorway instead and only stood there in the snow, very aware of his bleeding nose and the holes in his gums where there had been teeth when he woke up this morning.

This vision hurt him in a way he had not expected, piercing through to a place that wasn’t dead but only dozing.

It was now Eastern Standard No Time At All.

“I am the eggman, I am the eggman, I am the walrus! Goo-goo-joob!”

Hello heat, hello summer, hello darkness my old friend.

Twice he checked his watch, forgetting that it was now Eastern Standard No Time At All in the Jefferson Tract.

“Yeah,” he said. “ ‘Time slowed and reality bent; on and on the eggman went.’

“Why do I keep singing that?” he asked. “Why does that fucking song keep coming back?”

“Jonesy’s in the hospital,” he said abruptly. No idea what he meant. “Jonesy’s in the hospital with Mr. Gray. Got to stay there. ICU.”

Only . . . there was no more Jonesy, was there? Just the redblack cloud.

“Not true,” he said. “Jonesy’s still there. Jonesy’s in the hospital with Mr. Gray. That’s what the cloud is—Mr. Gray.” And then, apropos of nothing (at least that he could tell): “Fit wha? Fit neek?”

“Better underhill than over-hill,” he said.

when the only possible good news would be no news, maybe that was just as well.

“Time slowed, reality bent, on and on the eggman went.”

I want Jonesy. Old creeping death. Death pretending to be a patient. Death had lost track of him—sure, it was possible, it was a big hospital stuffed full of pain, sweating agony out its very seams—and now old creeping death was trying to find him again.

Once acceleration passes a certain point, all travel becomes time travel. Memory is the basis of every journey.

That makes him remember a Ray Bradbury story, he thinks it’s called “The Crowd,” where the people who gather at accident sites—always the same ones—determine your fate by what they say.

I’m what they were looking for. I don’t know how it can be, but I am just what they were looking for. Because . . . the cloud doesn’t change me? Yes, sort of.

He is unique and the cloud can only carry him, not change him.

No bounce, no play, he thinks, and then, immediately: Shhh, shhh, keep that to yourself.

Not anymore. Now he’s the eggman, and the eggman knows better.

We always die and we always live. We always lose and we always win.

The question was whether or not he should tell Underhill. Henry was terribly afraid that telling the man would do no good.

The trouble with Kurtz, Owen reckoned, was that he was playing with more than a full deck. A few extra aces in there. Also a few extra deuces, and everyone knew that deuces were wild.

Yet when Kurtz spoke again, Owen was almost positive he was hearing the real Kurtz, a human being and not Tick-Tock the Croc.

Owen thought: If I help him do this, it doesn’t matter if I actually pull a trigger or not, I’m as damned as the men who herded the Jews into the showers at Bergen-Belsen.

In spite of everything, which included knowing better.

A largely emotionless creature and part of a largely emotionless species, he had been hijacked by his host’s emotional juices—not just dipping in them this time but bathing.

Something’s happening to me, Mr. Gray thought, aware even as the thought came that it was essentially a “Jonesy” thought. I’m starting to be human. The fact that the idea was not without its attractions filled Mr. Gray with horror.

“Where’s Duddits?” Jonesy asks in a dazed, I’m-still-dreaming voice. “Did he go out with Beaver?”

“He’s back in Derry, foolish,” Henry says,

It was the dream, he thinks. Duddits was in the dream. He was sitting on the bank. He was crying. He was sorry. He didn’t mean to. If anyone meant to, it was us.

cold in the deep thoughtless way death must be cold,

Duds is up there on the bank, crying and crying, that crying that gets into your head like a sinus headache, and if it goes on it will drive Henry mad.

He’s only fourteen, but wise enough to know that what is said cannot be unsaid.

(of course, the time for some memories was never convenient).

That was the worst of it—it was trying to think.